György Kepes

György Kepes
American, born in Hungary, 1906-2001
Untitled (Children), 1939
Gelatin silver print
13.3 x 11.3 cm (Sheet)
Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame
Milly and Fritz Kaesser Endowment for Photography, 2021.000.001

Writing in 1967, György Kepes asserted that “the most convincing artistic forms of our time are inner models of structural vitality and social relevance. They give us confidence that in spite of everything there is still quality to life.” In this photograph the artist employed a style of art that pushes for innovative forms without losing their ties to contemporary society.

Kepes created Untitled (Children) in 1939, two years after he moved to Chicago to direct the Light and Color Workshop at the New Bauhaus. This work reflects Kepes’s interest in the combination of different media and bring together organic and geometric forms. To create this image, Kepes likely used a piece of watercolor paper as his base and painted the surface using different methods, including spraying pigment with an atomizer.  

The medium of collage reflects a conceptual throughline in Kepes’s work: bringing discrete objects together to make a unified whole and imposing order onto chaos. This idea manifests itself in several of the formal qualities of this work. Though Kepes integrated several different media and textures into the piece, compositionally he organized the picture plane largely within carefully defined geometric shapes. The solid and dashed lines that criss-cross through the scene  make up part of Kepes’s iconography from this period; they appear as a framing device in several of his collage-based and photographic works. However, the lines that organize and restrict the distinct elements of the piece also add a sense of dynamism, functioning as the point of transition between static and kinetic. The Rorschach-like spread of paint in the center of the composition, superimposed by the grid of squares and rectangles spilling into the periphery, further challenge any sense of fixedness.

In several ways, this photograph embodies Kepes’ interest in light. Working in the black and white tones of the gelatin silver print, the artist encourages the viewer to focus on the expressive potential of different tones of a grayscale palette. The crossing lines and skewed geometry of the central shapes give the work a fractured quality, like light being refracted through a prism. The solid and dashed lines also appear like light traveling across the page both as rays and individual particles, suggesting fluctuations in speed or temporal discontinuity as the eye moves across the scene. The use of black and white opposites also calls to mind the process of inversion from negative to positive inherent to photography. These allusions to light as both a universal medium tied to the most basic forms of life and a critical component of contemporary artistic technologies project a vision of modernity that works alongside, not against, humanity.

These formal elements relate to the style of the New Bauhaus, yet Kepes invested this work with social concern. He appropriated the image from a 1921 photographs of starving children at the Samara Refugee camp during the Russian Civil War and subsequent famine in Russia. Creating this work at the onset of World War II, Kepes perhaps saw it fit to reflect upon the aftermath of the First World War and the suffering that followed in its wake. As a Hungarian national viewing the Soviet takeover of his home country from exile, Kepes was able to take a critical eye to the growing humanitarian crisis in Eastern Europe. In this way, the image reflects Kepes's longstanding concerns for social justice, imbued in his student days in Hungary, when he was influenced by Socialist avant-garde artist and poet Lajos Kassák. All in all, Untitled (Children) reflects Kepes’s success in expressing humanitarian concern with contemporary techniques and modern, industrialized imagery.